“I will state for the record: I never said those things,” White told Speakeasy. “I was talking among my friends, having a private conversation.” White said he wasn’t contacted by many of the media outlets that published the account, calling it “purely bad journalism.” “They don’t get a name; they don’t get a source; they don’t get direct attribution.”

White said he believed Slate film critic Dana Stevens, who was seated at his table that night, to be the source of Variety’s initial piece. Stevens denied this, and Variety confirmed her account. “The Variety story broke at like one in the morning the night of the awards,” she said, at which point she was talking with a friend about the incident. “I had no idea it would be a news story at that point. I just thought this was going to be gossip the next day.”

Stevens said she couldn’t attribute any specific comment to White. “It was definitely members of his party,” she said, estimating his group to include six people. “I think it was more the younger guys that were with him.”

White wouldn’t discuss his friends, saying that they “are adults.” He disputed other firsthand accounts, including a Vanity Fair piece that reported him as saying, “White liberal bullsh–!” White said the reporter “didn’t see my mouth move and form those words. If she’s sitting behind me, how could she?”

Katey Rich, who reported the piece for Vanity Fair, stands by her account. “I was sitting behind him, but I could see his body language, I could hear everything that was being said for sure,” she told Speakeasy. “Through the power of visual body movement syncing up with audio,” she said she felt confident about what she heard and who said it.

New York Film Critics Circle chairman Joshua Rothkopfissued an apology about the alleged incident. He wrote: “I apologize sincerely for the crass bit of heckling Mr. McQueen encountered. I’m mortified to learn that this was from one of our own members. We are taking disciplinary action.”

White said Rothkopf never contacted him, saying “he issued that apology without ever coming to me to find out whether or not I actually did say those things.” Rothkopf couldn’t be reached for comment.

Director Steve McQueen, left, and actor Harry Belafonte at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards in New York

Getty Images

White panned McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” which received Golden Globe nominations for almost all the major categories for which it qualified. “I have no need to heckle Steve McQueen because I wrote what I wrote, and he knows what I wrote,” said White. “So I don’t need to repeat it for him or to him.”

Representatives for McQueen had no comment.

White attributes the controversy that sometimes seems to follow him to “intellectual jealousy.” “I am a trained film scholar and know my stuff, and most people who write criticism these days can’t claim that and they are bothered when I state my opinion with some conviction,” he said. “A critic’s job is not to promote movies, a critic’s job is to critique and to analyze, and people like the word contrarian because they don’t believe in criticism anymore. That’s how our culture has declined.”